Garrick Ohlsson Interview with Bruce Duffie . . . .. . . ..

Pianist Garrick Ohlsson

A Conversation with Bruce Duffie

Garrick Olaf Ohlsson (born April 3, 1948) is an American classical pianist. In 1970 Ohlsson became the first, and remains the only, competitor from the United States to win the gold medal awarded by the International Chopin Piano Competition, at the VIII competition. He also won first prize at the Busoni Competition in Bolzano, Italy and the Montreal Piano Competition in Canada. He was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize in 1994 and received the 1998 University Musical Society Distinguished Artist Award in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Ohlsson has also been nominated for three Grammy Awards, winning one in 2008. In 2018, in Warsaw, Ohlsson received the Gloria Artis Medal for Merit to Culture, conferred by the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.

Born in Bronxville, New York, the only child of a Swedish father, Alvar Ohlsson, who emigrated from Sweden after World War II, and Sicilian-American mother, Paulyne (Rosta), born in New York City, Ohlsson grew up in White Plains, New York. He began formal piano lessons at the Westchester Conservatory of Music with Tom Lishman at age eight. At the age of 13 he began studying with Sascha Gorodnitzki at the Juilliard School, and later with Rosina Lhévinne. His musical development has been influenced in completely different ways by a succession of distinguished teachers, most notably Claudio Arrau, Olga Barabini and Irma Wolpe.

Although Ohlsson is especially noted for his performances of the works of Chopin, Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt and Schubert, his range of repertoire is broad, extending from Bach and Busoni to Copland, Griffes, Debussy, Scriabin, Gershwin, Rachmaninoff, and contemporary composers who have written new works for him. His repertoire includes no fewer than 80 concertos. He is also known for his exceptional keyboard stretch (a 12th in the left hand and an 11th in the right).

Ohlsson has performed in North America with symphony orchestras of Atlanta, Charlotte, Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Boston, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Houston, Detroit, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Seattle, Denver, Washington, D.C., and Berkeley, among others, at the National Arts Center, with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and with the London Philharmonic at Lincoln Center in New York. He has also accompanied violinist Hilary Hahn and contralto Ewa Podles [as shown in the DVD below-right.].

Ohlsson is an avid chamber musician, having collaborated with the Cleveland, Emerson, Takács and Tokyo string quartets, in addition to other ensembles. In 2005–2006, he toured with the Takács Quartet [shown below]. He is also a founding member of San Francisco's FOG Trio, together with violinist Jorja Fleezanis and cellist Michael Grebanier.

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Among his many recordings, Ohlsson performed Chopin's entire musical output on Hyperion Records, including the complete solo piano music, chamber music, works for piano and orchestra, and songs. In 1989, he recorded Busoni's five-movement Piano Concerto in C major, Op. 39 with the Cleveland Orchestra under Christoph von Dohnányi. He has also recorded all 32 Beethoven piano sonatas for Bridge Records [one volume of which is shown above.].

== Names which are links in this box and below refer to my interviews elsewhere on my website. BD

In August of 1988, Garrick Ohlsson returned to Chicago for an all-Chopin program at the Auditorium Theater. Staying with friends in a close suburb, we got together at their home for a conversation. His responses were both thoughtful and thorough. Having just turned 40, his experience was solid, and yet he retained a youthful enthusiasm for the various topics we discussed.

Portions of the chat were used several times on WNIB, Classical 97, and now in 2025 I am pleased to present the entire encounter.

Bruce Duffie: How do you divide your schedule between solo, chamber, and concerto repertoire?
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Garrick Ohlsson:   It’s a little bit like the fresh fish special in a restaurant. It depends on the catch of the day, pretty much, or the market price. I would say that the tendency has been for me to play the vast majority of my appearances with orchestra. It’s hard to give it a percentage, but it’s probably about 75% with orchestra, about 10% to 15% chamber music, and the rest are recitals. It’s hard to know, and it varies from season to season.

BD:   Would you like to give more solo recitals?

Ohlsson:   I’d love to, but you can’t do it without being invited. It’s not that I don’t get invited, it’s just that I don’t believe there are that many solo recitals. Recitals don’t draw, and most recital series don’t have much budget as a result.

BD:   [Surprised] There seem to be a lot of them here in the Chicago area...

Ohlsson:   In major cities, yes, there are lots of series, but I find that I tend to get many more orchestral invitations.

BD:   Does that have anything to do with the power of your playing, or the style of your playing?

Ohlsson:   I would hope not.

BD:   It’s the same thing with the solo vocal recitals, and the art of the Lied. There’s a big preponderance of opera, and while there are a lot of singers who participate in concerts, there are very few who come and give a Lieder recital. There are a couple established ones, like Schwarzkopf or Fisher-Dieskau, but the young ones are not coming up to take their place.

Ohlsson:   I wonder why that is.

BD:   Is the public being brainwashed that they want to see something big and splashy like an orchestral concert, rather than a more intimate evening of song?

Ohlsson:   I think so. There’s a natural tendency to like a spectacle. Opera is more popular than a solo recital, because there’s so much more going on, both good and bad. It’s a different kind of event because opera contains a lot of music, but it’s other things besides that. A Lieder recital is basically music, text, and audience.

BD:   Is there a direct correlation between a concerto and an opera, as opposed to a solo recital for piano and a Lieder recital for singer?

Ohlsson:   I don’t know if there’s a direct correlation, but it’s a certain similar kind of level of intensity. If I play a Brahms concerto, it’s like a great operatic role for a singer. You have to go through a great, enormous range, but you are doing it on the heroic scale. Whereas in a solo recital, you are everything. You are the beginning, middle, and end, and you are all the atmosphere. You are the foreground, and the background, and all the intellectual and emotional content of the evening. In a Brahms concerto, you can ride on the surges of the orchestra, and they can be inspired by you. But when you are giving a solo recital, you can’t do that. Programming is also a very difficult art.

BD:   Do you do your own programming?

Ohlsson:   Oh yes, absolutely.

BD:   Does that include even when you are invited to do a Brahms concerto, but you’d rather do one by Chopin?

Ohlsson:   Oh no, I was talking about recital programming. When I’m soloist of the orchestra, it’s very simple. I have a list of concertos which I play, and each season I pick certain ones which I would like, if possible, to concentrate on. Because I play over 60 concertos now, I really don’t want to get asked for 25 in a season — which could happen — because it’s just impossible to give each one the time it needs. So I will try to emphasize six or seven. Then, of course, orchestras have their own needs. If you are playing with the Chicago Symphony, the Music Director has to balance out the programming, and I also dare say that if you ask pianists which concertos they want to play, we all have certain ones which are favorites, and most of us have the same favorites. We all do love the Brahms concertos, for example.

BD:   This is my basic question. Among the 60 concertos that you know, and maybe 200 others that exist, how do you decide which few you would like to play in a season?

Ohlsson:   It’s mix-and-match again. For example, you might be recording one, therefore you want to play it as much as possible so it’s as fresh as possible. I might not have played the Beethoven 4th in three years, and would really like to play it and study it some more to deepen my understanding and ability with it.

BD:   Then does that alter your reaction when they say, “We don’t want the 4th, but we’ll take the Emperor”?

Ohlsson:   Right, because then you have to decide whether you will say yes or no, because if an artist is being offered a date contingent on repertory, sometimes turning down the repertory means turning down the date. Sometimes you want to do that, and sometimes you don’t want to do that. It’s very ticklish.

BD:   I assume that you have many more offers than you could possibly accommodate.
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Ohlsson:   It seems that way, thank goodness, touch wood and all those things. I cannot fulfill all the requests. That’s what managers are for, to try to sort all the things out. But don’t forget, institutions have very busy and demanding schedules and needs, also. Very often, when an orchestra calls up asking about availability on the date, it’s not yet a firm offer. It’s what they’d like to have, but they have to figure out the other things. Then, Pavarotti, who was supposed to come in May, and he’s much more famous than anybody, suddenly now has to come in October, the date which was mine. But they can’t do a piano that day because they already have the chorus hired. So what are they going to do? It’s very funny... I’m from the suburbs of New York, and I used to go to the New York Philharmonic when I was a teenager. My piano teacher got me a subscription, and I went on Sunday afternoons, and I thought it was all done by divine right. [Laughs] I thought that every soloist just sat there all the time. I thought this was the inevitable result of the flowering of musical culture. I had no idea how incredibly haphazard the whole thing can be sometimes. I don’t mean haphazard in terms of artistic choice, but just in terms of reality, and what can be accommodated.

BD:   It’s very intricate to put together the whole season. [Vis-à-vis the recording shown at left, see my interview with Sir Donald Runnicles.]

Ohlsson:   It’s an extraordinary jigsaw puzzle that the public has very little idea of.

BD:   Should the public have an idea of it?

Ohlsson:   Probably not. I don’t see why they should, any more than you should know why your doctor gives you one antibiotic instead of another, or why your car mechanic fixes something that isn’t broken.

BD:   What is it that a pianist is giving the public?

Ohlsson:   I don’t know. If there are 2,000 people that hear me play, there are 2,000 reasons for being there. One of the things I wonder about most intensely is the extraordinary lack of unanimity of response of the human creature. I wonder why people go to concerts. I might go to a concert to hear Alicia de Larrocha do a Mozart concerto, because I love her playing and I love to hear her play Mozart. I also want to hear what ornaments she adds this year, and what cadenzas she’s doing, because I’m playing the same piece next year, and I want to see if I like them.

BD:   But those are technical things.

Ohlsson:   Yes, except I also love her playing, and that’s a pleasure. I wouldn’t go unless I did, plus I know her, and I like her, and I want to say hello. It’s also a friendship thing. It’s a musical thing, it’s a pleasure thing, and it’s a friendship thing, besides being a technical thing. It’s professional. I listen on more than one level. I go to hear my distinguished colleagues, and even though I’m a competent enough pianist, I sometimes don’t know where their mind is, so to speak, because music is an infinitely varied phenomenon. To take it one step further, if a colleague of mine who’s a musician but not a pianist goes, they don’t hear all the technical things I do, just as I don’t necessarily hear them when a violinist plays. I hear the musical impulse, and I hear the musical line. Then there are people who have never even heard a concerto by Mozart in their lives before. So why are they there? Is it because their wives dragged them, and now are they going to sleep? Or did they drag their wife? There are infinite numbers of reasons. Are they going to be seen? Are they going because they love music, or because they’re trying it out? It just staggers me that there’s any unanimity of response at all, or not even unanimity that 3,000 people want to sit in the hall doing the same thing. In the same way, there’s no correct way of listening to music. Some people follow the syntax, but it takes a certain amount of musical education to do that. You follow the syntax, and the way the voices respond to each other, and you follow the architecture of the piece, and the drama even if you don’t know the piece necessarily. Even some people who know music quite well listen in a very impressionistic way, and that’s equally correct. There’s no correct way to listen to music, and sometimes I even wonder why there are concerts! [Laughs] But I’m very glad there are, because it’s mostly a human affair anyway. So when you ask me what a pianist gives to an audience, I don’t know. Some give more than others, and some give less. It’s very hard to know, and that’s why, even among professionals and music people of relative expertise, we disagree.

* * * * *

BD: Talking about audiences, do they differ from city to city, or country to country?

Ohlsson: Yes and no. That’s a tough one because I have such strong feelings about the differences in audiences, and yet sometimes I realize it’s incredibly subjective. For instance, if you play the Rachmaninoff Third Concerto with a decent orchestra and you get a standing ovation, is that because you’ve played it so spectacularly brilliantly, or is that because the sheer act of playing the piece even decently is already such a heroic and exciting feat, and the music is so exciting and visceral that it gets the standing ovation? On the other hand, if I play the Mozart Adagio in D minor and people jump up from the seats and start screaming like they do after the Rachmaninoff Third, I’ve done something very, very wrong. This is because there are certain appropriate human responses to pieces of music, whether or not you’re dealing with people who are musical at all. Now by ‘musical’ I mean that they have any sort of innate sense of what music is. Some people don’t have this, but most people do. So, if I play the Mozart Adagio in D minor, and the moment I’ve played the last soft chord somebody yells from the balcony and everybody starts screaming, then there’s something really wrong. Equally, if you play the Rachmaninoff Third Concerto and you have a reverential silence of 30 seconds following the last chord, you’ve done something really, really inappropriate to the music, because different music demands a different response. So, in that context, audiences are more similar than they are different. The Rachmaninoff Third in Prague or in Indianapolis more or less gets the same response as does the Op. 111 of Beethoven. On the other hand, there are degrees of intensity with which people listen to music, and that is very hard for me to judge, because, for example, for me to say how audiences in Chicago listen to music, I would have to go to lots and lots and lots of concerts here over the course of one season, and see which audiences respond to. Generally, I would say that the best audiences I’ve found — and by ‘best’ I mean are most knowledgeable, most enthusiastic, and most attentive — seem to come in Eastern Europe, meaning East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Vienna to a certain extent... although Vienna is a little bit spoiled like Chicago and New York, where the plethora of things are easily available. It seems to me in Eastern Europe you have a great deal of the old-fashioned tradition, plus they’re not inundated, and not over-stimulated with everything in the world marching through every evening. They can’t afford to get blasé about what happens. People there take music very, very, very seriously, and that’s very important.
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BD:   Is that all due to their political circumstances?

Ohlsson:   Maybe. I don’t want to get too deeply into that because I don’t really know the answers, although I could theorize, because in an information-censored society, music is uncensorable — unless you just censor the piece entirely and don’t play it. But I think it also has to do with tradition and economics. The economics, of course, has to do with the political system, too, but they don’t have the easy availability. If you’re in Dresden and you go into a record store, you don’t have two dozen versions of the Eroica on compact disc. First of all, there may not be a compact disc, or if there are, they’re just starting now. [Remember, this conversation took place in 1988, when CDs were still fairly new to the market.] You might have two or three versions of even something like the Eroica, and that’s all. It’s not the department store mentality that we have here in the West, and yet you have a very long music tradition. Also, in Middle European societies, music is considered important. It’s no wonder that Chicago became such a musically important city in our country, with its enormous Germanic background and its enormous groups of Hungarian, Czech, and Polish people. It’s not that these people are specifically more musical, but those cultures honor music a little more than the English, who honor it certainly quite enough, but not to the same degree. In that sense, in our country the audience for classical music is very small. In West Germany or in Austria, maybe it’s twice as many per capita, but it’s still not overwhelming. But if a man from Mars came and asked me about baseball, which I’m not interested in, I could tell him what baseball is because I’m an American! Americans know baseball. Lots of Germans wouldn’t think of going to a classical music concert, but Beethoven is theirs, and he’s great. That’s important, and I want my kids to at least learn about it. It’s a kind of attitude that this is something that’s very important.

BD:   Are we losing this in the American tradition now? Are the youngsters coming up not getting inculcated?

Ohlsson:   To a certain extent. I don’t really mean to be too much of a social philosopher here because I don’t know the answer, but the schools are teaching a lot less music than they did even in my time, and it was never that much. Public school music education wasn’t fabulous when I was growing up in the ’50s and ’60s, but at least it was there, and I hear that it’s barely there anymore. So if our educational institutions don’t educate, it’s going to be very, very difficult. Also, as people get absorbed into the melting pot of America, sometimes those traditions do get lost a little bit. On the other hand, we have an enormous audience out there for classical music, thank God.

BD:   In that way, is Pavarotti helping the pianists and the oboists?

Ohlsson:   I tend to doubt it. He’s a great artist, but he’s also what’s called a ‘crossover figure’. His fame has reached way beyond the normal confines of even a great opera singer, who are special beasts anyway. They might lump us together, which is neither good nor bad. It just is. There have been people who have theorized that even the plethora of music which is easily available now on TV will help concert attendance, and some people say it will hurt. I don’t want to mention any names, but in Chicago you have one of the less than half dozen greatest orchestras in the world. Therefore, no matter how great your CD collection is, when something special is happening at Orchestra Hall, even the most jaded music lover is quite inclined to go listen. There are many cities in the world that don’t have an orchestra like this one, and not to be insulting to anybody, but if you live in a community of a quarter million somewhere a thousand miles from Chicago, maybe you don’t want to go hear the Eroica Symphony that night. Maybe you’d rather put on the CD of the Chicago Symphony playing it, or view the Berlin Philharmonic play it on TV. Frankly, it’s very hard for any symphony orchestra in small-town USA, or small-town Germany, to compete with a Berlin Philharmonic. So I don’t really know if it helps or hurts. I’m just raising the questions right now. I’m not giving you any answers.

BD:   Here in and around the metropolitan Chicago area, there are several symphony orchestras. Some of them are semi-professional, and some of them are not at all professional. But even if they are very professional, they’re not the Chicago Symphony.

Ohlsson:   Right, exactly. That’s a perfectly good illustration, and yet those orchestras can fulfill a social and community function the Chicago Symphony may not be able to fill on a local level. They may give a certain amount of pleasure, because music, as I said, is a very multifarious thing. There’s no right way, and if your wife plays second violin in a community orchestra, you may get a certain pleasure out of going to that orchestra that even a great orchestra can’t give you, because you have a certain sense of personal involvement with the people involved.

BD:   You might go to all six of their concerts each season, whereas you might go downtown just once.

Ohlsson:   Yes, and they might be closer, or easier to get to. All these things figure into your choices.

* * * * *

BD:   Let’s turn the conversation around a little bit now...

Ohlsson:   We’ve gotten kind of far afield, haven’t we? [Both laugh]

BD:   But that’s great. I love discussing this kind of thing, and seeing what the working musician feels about all this. [Pauses a moment and changes the topic] Do you play differently in front of a live audience than in front of the microphone?
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Ohlsson:   Oh, yes. I like to play for a live audience much better than I like to play for a microphone. I, like many of my colleagues, have been trained to actually perform. There’s a certain recreative surge that happens, or at least we hope it happens. [Laughs] Mostly it happens. Sometimes we have a bad night, but there’s a surge and thrill. You spend years of your life learning how to play, and learning this music, and you spend hours in rehearsal developing the fine points of phrasing and tone and technique and style and delivery. Then comes the time to go out and play your Beethoven sonata or your Chopin Polonaise, or whatever it is, and you have to put it all together at that moment. You have to create one unity. In a recording studio, you can start off with the greatest performance, but if something goes wrong, then you can stop, but then you may not get the whole flow back. With a performance, it has to go start to finish, just like the piece. The constraint of time is the unique constraint of the work of music. Other art forms don’t have the constraint of time. A painter or sculptor can go over the work as much as he wants, and his constraint may destroy the medium. Each artwork has its own constraints, but music has this incredible, delicious, and frustrating constraint of time. The music starts and ends, and to try to create everything that happens in a piece of music in your interpretation of it for a live audience is amazingly stimulating and exciting for me. Also, before a live audience I can try things out which I don’t have to live with for the rest of my life. But if I put it down on a record, it’s there forever. Let’s say I do a rubato that I think is in shockingly bad taste. Truly, who’s to say what’s in bad taste, except I can say so, at least about my own playing. Or, if I do something which I think is a great idea, and then I overdo it. Sometimes in the emotion of the moment, you can do something which is so beautiful, and yet so exaggerated, but it’s so filled with real meaning and genuineness, and real intent for that moment. You’ve gone out on a limb, and you’ve done something that’s really extravagant, that when you hear it back on a tape and you’ll feel it was okay, but if I heard it four or five times in a row, I’d get sick of it. It’s exaggerated, or it’s too rich, or it’s not appropriate.

BD:   How much of that is inertia from the performance? You’re building up to this, and you can exaggerate it, but you wouldn’t if you had started it two bars ahead.

Ohlsson:   Exactly, because the emotional flow is not lost in the recording studio, but it’s much harder to recreate. Also, when you’re just playing for a microphone and a couple of people in a sound booth, it’s much easier to be objective and self-conscious, and analyze what you’re doing. I’m not one of those people who says that studio recordings are sterile. Sometimes they are, and sometimes they’re not, because sometimes you can achieve an extraordinary kind of ideal concentration in a recording studio. But for me, it’s much harder work. Also, you have another constraint of time which is totally different from the real one of a musical performance. It’s the fact that you’ve got X amount of energy in a given day, and because of economics, a recording company can afford to rent that recording studio for you for a certain amount of hours. If you’re recording with an orchestra, the constraint is even greater because you have to pay the orchestra union rates to sit there, and those guys don’t just sit there because it’s fun. They want to get paid for it. So you’ve got the pressure of time. For a solo recording, you might have four three-hour sessions to do a normal 12-inch LP, which is now becoming extinct! [Both laugh] But that means you basically want 15 minutes of music recorded for about three hours of session.

BD:   That seems awfully luxurious to the non-trained listener.

BD:   Yes, but let’s say you’ve got two sessions in a day. Your car was late, or your train was late, or your bus was late, or your hotel didn’t wake you on time, or it happens to somebody else who’s involved with production. Maybe the piano tuner didn’t get there on time, and he’s busy tuning the piano. In that three hours I’ve got to work with the piano tuner to get the piano voiced the way I want. We’ve got to set the balance the way we want, so that the recording engineer and producer and I more or less agree that this is the way we want it to sound. You can diddle around with that, and suddenly an hour and a half is gone. So suddenly you’ve got much less time to record your movement of a Beethoven sonata. What I ordinarily do is play it through once. I warm up a little, play it through once, then listen to it to see how it goes. Does it sound the way I think it did? Do I like the basic approach? Then I go and record it again, and listen to it again. So that’s perhaps four times through, and out of those you pick a Mother Take. Then you start fixing up the details, which never went right in any of the sessions. Sometimes you even artistically think you should move this section a little bit faster, so you do that, and you realize you’ve ruined something else in the subtle chemistry and balance. Then, just when you’ve gotten that phrase at the peak of beauty, there’s a studio noise because of heating pipes expansion and contraction, which happens even in the modern world! So the best take is actually ruined by a technical flaw. Then they have to stop and change tapes. By this time, you’ve maybe been working on a five-minute movement of music for an hour and ten minutes, and the producer says that we’d better go on now. So the free flow of inspiration is very difficult. For an artist like Glenn Gould, who somehow managed to get so popular that his records were guaranteed sellers, it was very luxurious for him to sit in a recording studio and do it over and over again over a period of weeks. If I had that kind of time it might be fun, but I don’t. Therefore, recording is a real trial for me.

BD:   If you’re working on this five-minute piece over and over and over again, how do you keep it fresh on that last time, which eventually will perhaps be the best take?

Ohlsson:   That’s exactly the problem. Maybe sometimes you don’t, and you think you’re not fresh, and if it’s a good producer, he can tell you that you do sound fresh. Or sometimes he can actually tell you it’s getting awfully unspontaneous, so we give it a rest and come back to it later and do something else in the meantime. That’s when suddenly this stretch of 12 hours doesn’t seem to be very much time at all. Then, of course, you have the other constraints. If you’re working for a major company, like when I was recording for Angel Records in England at the EMI Studio, perhaps your session is from 10:00 to 1:00. You have to be out of there on the dot of 1:00 because the London Symphony is coming in to record La Bohème, and they have to set up the chairs for the chorus. They don’t care if you’re in the middle of the very best take, or if you’re really hot at that moment. Sorry. Bye. [Laughs] If you’ve got an orchestra and chorus and four expensive opera singers coming in, they’re not going to wait for some lousy pianist to play a Chopin piece. It is a tough situation, and I don’t mean to be too negative about it, but what I’m trying to do now is give the lay person who’s interested in music a tiny tad of the flavor of what goes on there. To be really too broad about it, there really are people who go to concerts regularly, and think that we just get dressed backstage and come out and play, and that’s all. The rest is champagne and parties and glamorous flights on glamorous airplanes. They believe that he just plays piano for half an hour, and that’s all he does.
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BD:   He learned the piece when he was a kid, and now he plays it forever.

Ohlsson:   Right, exactly. I think some people think that. As a matter of fact, I once went to the New York Philharmonic concert, and I forget who the soloist was at this occasion, but one little old lady said to another little old lady, “I’m so glad he’s learned the piece. Two weeks ago, we heard Itzhak Perlman, and he didn’t learn the piece at all. He played the Berg Concerto, and he was using the music!” I felt like saying to her, “Not even an artist like Itzhak Perlman can sight-read the Berg Concerto! Do you think he was just reading the notes for the first time???” [Both laugh] It just goes to show you the degree of misunderstanding. Sometimes people really don’t know what we’re doing up there at all.

BD:   Pianists have the music rack that is on the instrument. Do you ever use the score in front of you?

Ohlsson:   Oh yes, sure I have, many times, and people always have to talk about it. To talk about art is really very subtle, and I’m not being a snob whether they have music there or not. For example, I will use the music in a chamber situation where I have to collaborate. You may know the piece well enough to play it from memory, but when you’re playing with three or four other people on stage, what if one of them has a momentary difficulty? Can you claim that you know every single note of that score so well, including their parts, that you can help them get back on track? You really have to hang on. Another example is when I played in Chicago last year with the Chicago Symphony. I did the Wuorinen Third Concerto, which is a modern piece I premiered [and recorded, shown at left. See my interview with Herbert Blomstedt.] It was written for me, but at that point I hadn’t quite yet memorized it. There’s no shame in that. Memory is useful, but it’s not a purely musical thing. Lots of people can memorize Hamlet’s soliloquy, but that doesn’t mean they’re John Gielgud or Laurence Olivier. It doesn’t mean you’re an actor just because you can learn the words.

BD:   So it doesn’t automatically mean that you then transcend into the musical values?

Ohlsson:   Not necessarily, and having the music there doesn’t mean that you don’t, either. For me, it’s easier to memorize because that’s my training and my expectation. It’s easy for me to forget myself without the music there. But if you’re accompanying a singer, or if you’re working with other people, even in solo recitals, once in a while I’ve just thought that my life has been difficult. I’ve over-planned. Life has been stressful. Airplanes were later than I thought they were. My music got lost for three days while X airline couldn’t find it. It feels very funny in a solo recital to have music there, but I feel I should listen to myself. I wouldn’t judge anybody badly for that, so why be so hard on yourself? On the other hand, I don’t like having it there, because usually, by the time I can play a piece in public, I know it virtually from memory anyway, and having music there is sometimes more of a distraction. It’s a very complicated process. Behind everything I’ve said so far is the question that should the layman know about the internal processes? Maybe they should and maybe they shouldn’t, but it’s all very complex. What looks like a very standard show on stage, when the lights go down and the musicians are tuned, the conductor comes out and people applaud. But even behind such a standard routine lies hundreds of decisions each time by hundreds of people. It is amazing that it happens at all sometimes!

BD:   Are most of those decisions made correctly?

Ohlsson:   Sometimes yes, sometimes no, but it’s very human, because all of our lives as people are filled with these kinds of decisions. Sometimes we do the right thing, and sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we wish we’d done it a little differently, and sometimes we wish we’d done it a lot differently. Who knows? I don’t know. It’s certainly a living process, that’s for sure.

* * * * *

BD: Coming back to the recordings, are you basically pleased with what has been issued so far?

Ohlsson: Basically yes, and now I’m going to sound like so many artists I’m sure you’ve talked to... I have to confess that I basically don’t listen to them. I don’t really need to know what my records sound like because I spend so much time getting ready for them and making them. In the meantime, my thoughts about pieces do change. You do develop and grow and learn things and have changes of heart. Sometimes it goes through a cycle, which many artists have described, and I have to say I fall right into it. When you make a record and you put so much of yourself into it, you prepare intensely for it, and usually when you make it, you’re quite pleased. Then you forget about it. It’s like having a baby, except that you don’t have to raise it anymore. You have it and it’s there, and then when the finished product comes back a few months later, it’s usually a great delight. It’s like, wow, gee, I didn’t do so badly after all. This kid is all right. Then about a year or two later, if you happen to hear it, the subtle processes of change have happened in you. The record sits there and tells you what you were doing two years ago, and you begin to chafe a little bit. Then there usually comes a point where you really don’t like it. That happened to me with a couple of my records. When I recorded the Chopin Scherzos, I went through this whole process, and about five years later I didn’t like them at all. I had learned so much about Chopin, and so much about pedaling in Chopin, and so much about certain aspects of phrasing. I had gone so deeply into it that I thought the ones on that record were terrible. I even said to my friends that my Scherzos record is terrible. Then the other day I listened to part of it because somebody wanted to broadcast one of them, and I just wanted to hear what it sounds like. I thought, hey, that’s pretty good. I would do it differently now, and it almost feels like a different person, but not bad. I was talented back in 1973, just not as smart as I am now. [Laughs]
ohlsson

BD:   So it’s a decent performance by a decent performer? [LP shown at right]

Ohlsson:   Oh yes, sure. I wouldn’t disown it at all, as a matter of fact. I can’t wait for it to be re-released so some critic can say how definitive it was, though he may have attacked it when it was released. That happens, too. Even critics change.

BD:   Do you ever feel that you’re competing against your records when you play the same repertoire on a concert?

Ohlsson:   Yes, and against everybody else’s records, too. I’m now an old enough fogey, having just turned 40. When I began my career in 1970, having won the Chopin Prize, the record market, although enormous then, was not nearly as repetitive as it is now. I tended to get compared to Rubinstein mostly, who was known for Chopin. People would often say with great delight, “You do it differently than the Rubinstein record I have at home, but I really like this.” Or, if they didn’t like it, they wouldn’t tell you anything. All you can say as an artist is, “I’m flattered to even be compared to Rubinstein,” because even he didn’t sound like his own recordings, because he grew and changed. Now that I have some records of my own, some people notice that there are changes from the way I used to do things. I’ve gotten over worrying about whether I’m doing it right, although you never really get over it. It’s just that as you grow older and become a little more mature, and know a lot more and have been through a lot more processes in the world, you realize that passion to get a phrase exactly how it had to go when you were 25, and any other way was just unbearable is too much. Now it’s okay. It could go this way and it can go that way. I choose this way, and maybe next time I won’t. It’s really very funny, and you’ll find that with great artists who are documented several times over their career change, and often quite a lot, especially in matters of things like tempo. They often find their own earlier recordings quite unbearable. I remember a very funny story about the conductor William Steinberg, who said with a wry sense of humor to a young colleague, “You know why it is that nobody knows the right tempos for the Beethoven symphonies anymore? I listen to my own records, and even I didn’t used to know." Then he would chuckle. [Both laugh] You have to have a certain degree of humor and modesty about these things.

BD:   Is there going to be more difference between your Chopin record ten years ago and today, than from today and ten years hence?

Ohlsson:   That I can’t say. Do you have a good crystal ball? [Both laugh] I find that very hard to answer. I would say there is a great difference, though. Some of the differences would be broad, like tempo, and some would be quite subtle, as to character, phrase, and so on. I’m just happy to say in my own case that sometimes I’ve assumed that I’m such a clod that I really don’t grow and nothing changes. Then I listen to some old records and say that they may not be better, but they certainly are different, at least to me, and I’m happy about that. One must preface it by saying self-characterization is very dangerous in any area of human endeavor, but it certainly seems to me that what I do now has a lot more vividness, and a lot more emotionally volatile rightness. I feel I’m much more confident, but I may be whistling in the wind right now because I don’t know how I sound to other people.

BD:   Is the proof in the pudding when other people come to you and say that your music has more vividness?

Ohlsson:   I hope so... that is if I trust them or respect them. I’m trying to paint the complex picture, but I don’t want to sound like Pollyanna either. It’s very difficult. After a while you get used to the idea that maybe you might be good enough. You may not be as good as you want to be, but you might be decent. So you should stop worrying about being able to play the passage.

BD:   Building on all that, what advice do you have for young pianists coming along?

Ohlsson:   Don’t practice too much. [Laughs] Quite seriously, don’t over-practice. Over-practicing is one of the most serious problems that you get with youngsters all the time. I won’t proudly say I never over-practiced, but I mostly didn’t. Let me preface this by saying you should play with your head rather than with your rear end on the piano bench. Here’s another common misconception. How many hours a day do you have to practice? Some days none, some days six, some days four. It depends on your anxiety, which is a very important factor in the equation. How much you think you need to play with the actual work that needs to be done? A lot of people assume that just by sitting on your rear end in front of the piano for X number of hours, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing. It’s not just wiggling your fingers. It’s not an athletic process, although there is athleticism in it. It’s the direct connection to your brain and to your emotions, and how you’re going to put the whole thing together. So, with young pianists my advice is don’t practice so that you get brain fatigue, because if you get brain fatigue, you get into really bad habits, and it’s almost worse to continue to practice. Of course, when you’re young and your body and mind are forming, you have to go through lots of trial and error, so you have to play a lot anyway. But for a talented young musician who might go to Juilliard, four hours a day should really be plenty — if you can really concentrate that much! For me to practice four good hours takes about six. I can’t just sit there for four hours with a timer and say that I’ve practiced four hours. It doesn’t work that way. Sometimes you just have to stop. It’s like any semi-creative endeavor. You have to stop if it isn’t getting any better. What are my goals? What am I trying to improve? It’s not just going over and over and over and hoping it will get better miraculously. You have to know what you’re doing.

BD:   When it becomes necessary, do you go away and think about it, or do you go away and play baseball?

Ohlsson:   Both. Sometimes I’ll go away and think about it, and sometimes I’ll go away and play baseball... or in my case video games, and forget about it. But remember that the subconscious does a lot of work even while your conscious mind is resting. The most important thing about rest and recreation is that the process is continuous. It’s like sticking a good stew in the refrigerator. Some stews are better the next day, because something’s happened chemically to all the elements, even though you weren’t paying attention to it. The same thing happens with brain fatigue, and it happens with musical processes because it’s like the creative process. We all know of geniuses who have woken up in the middle of the night and said, “Eureka, I have the answer to the problem which has been bothering me for the last three months!” It’s the same thing with musical interpretation. You can have many of those little ‘eurekas’ all the time. You’re playing, and suddenly you make the connection. You weren’t even worried about it. I could have done that six months ago, and now it’s just so simple. So it’s very important to think about these things, but it’s also important not to force. Let the answers rise to the surface naturally. I know this all sounds too easy. You do have to work terribly hard, but you have to also trust your intuition.

* * * * *

BD:   You’ve got an enormous repertoire to choose from. Is the repertoire for piano still expanding?

Ohlsson:   Yes, mine is. I’m still at the point where I feel young enough, and my brain isn’t dead enough yet that I want to expand. I’m not yet at the point in my artistic development where, like many great artists, I want to pull the reins in a little bit and limit myself and specialize more. Since technically I’m a pianist who can probably handle almost anything written in the piano repertory, I’m fascinated by the challenges, and I love the stimulation of different music. On the other hand, it’s wonderful to come back to things that you know extremely well, and deepen your understanding and knowledge. But to answer your question a bit more simply, yes, I’m still expanding. I figure by the time I’m 50, I’d better learn all those concertos that I want to learn. I don’t want to learn them all, obviously, but there are still another dozen Mozarts for me to go. I don’t want to deny myself the pleasure.

BD:   What about new works, and the world premieres? [Vis-à-vis the recording shown at right (with the artists that gave the world premiere!), see my interviews with Henri Lazarof, and Gerard Schwarz,]

Ohlsson:   I do a fair amount of those. The most recent concerto I premiered was by Charles Wuorinen, which I’ve played with great success in a number of places, including here in Chicago. That gives me a great deal of pleasure. If not premiere, I try to at least do a major, absolutely contemporary work each season. It is something which will be new for me, but it’s something that’s not standard because it stretches the limits. It teaches you all kinds of things. When you work on new music, you get your fingers dirty with materials of music. If I were to play, let’s say, the Beethoven Opus 28 Sonata, which I’ve never performed or even studied, I could probably play most of it for you by ear, because I’ve heard Schnabel’s recording, and Arrau’s recording, and other recordings. I’ve seen 15 editions, and I’ve read through it, and I’ve wondered about the piece, so the moment I start to work on it I bring to it an enormous experience. I’m already talking about the fine gradations of tempo. That’s where I start working, whereas if you get an absolutely new piece of music written yesterday, you have no preconceptions. You don’t know how it sounds. You don’t know what the tunes are. You don’t know how Rubinstein played it, or how Solti conducts it, or anything. You don’t have any ideas about it.

BD:   Does how Rubinstein would have played it usually go through your mind?

Ohlsson:   No. I don’t think about it consciously. I just think about the materials of music in the cleanest state — note values, lengths, rhythms, phrase marks, dynamics, and which finger goes on which note. I use it more like a blueprint. A builder has to flesh out a blueprint, and the blueprint has to be exact. That’s the composer’s job, and now it’s my job to turn it into a sound. It’s my job to find out how the piece goes. So I have no preconception at all. As a matter of fact, you just go from the first note to the second note and make sure that the relations are quite neat and clean. It’s like digging in the garden. You’re in touch with the actual notes, and you get your mind and your fingers dirty with elements of music, rather than with preconceptions about what it should sound like. It’s a blank slate, and then it slowly turns itself into a piece, and that’s a very rewarding process. I find that’s extremely rewarding when I go back to a standard work, because you look at something and think you’ve always heard it played this way, but that’s not exactly what it says, so let’s try this over again. Let’s check it out.

BD:   That makes the Mozart works fresher?

Ohlsson:   Absolutely. There comes a time when an artist can play too much repertory, but there’s no right way to be an artist either. The maniacal perfectionism of, say, Benedetti Michelangeli, which I admired and was intimidated by when I was a teenager, wouldn’t be right for me. That was a suit of clothes I tried on for myself for a while, and I felt it isn’t me. I may not even be as good, and I’m probably not as good, but it’s not me, and I cannot torture myself for not being Michelangeli, or Horowitz, or Schnabel. Vive la différence! You have to be the best artist you can be in the greatest harmony with your own nature, whatever that is.

BD:   Are there young pianists coming along who are torturing themselves trying to be another so-and-so?

Ohlsson:   I think there are. I’m sure there are, because I tortured myself, and all the kids I knew at Juilliard wanted to be one or the other. It’s like you’re trying on different personas, and you learn from all of them. It’s not a negative thing. It’s very positive. For example, the Horowitz phenomenon would be the easiest to document, because he was the most important influence on American piano playing in the post-World War II period. You can hear it in the recordings of the young American pianists. There is that maniacal intensity and fanatic attention to perfection and blistering virtuosity. It’s great. There is nothing wrong with it at all, but he is Horowitz because he is who he is. He doesn’t try to sound like Horowitz. He just is Horowitz, and the rest of us were just trying to imitate something that you couldn’t really understand. We’ve all learned a lot from him, but it would be a fatal mistake to assume that because this is the most electrifying piano playing of its time, and also the most successful, therefore, if you don’t play that way it’s no good. You can’t force yourself to be him, or to be anybody else.

BD:   Are there younger pianists now who are coming along who are in the league of Horowitz and of the next generation.

Ohlsson:   That’s a good question. There are times when I look back and truly feel that none of us were in that league when we were growing up, and I won’t talk about myself, yet some of my colleagues are doing pretty darn well, and they’re turning into themselves. It’s a big question. I wonder if there is another Toscanini. Is there another Furtwängler? Is there another Zinka Milanov? I don’t know.

BD:   Can you go to a recital of any of the younger pianists and learn something?

Ohlsson:   Yes, but I don’t usually go to many piano recitals by anybody now, because I’m not usually in places where there’s more than one piano recital going on. When I’m back home in New York, I would rather go to the Opera, or the Philharmonic, or a chamber group, or new music events. Those are the things I get more of a bang out of. When I go to hear piano recitals, I go to hear established artists who I really know I will enjoy and learn from. Sometimes I’ll go to hear youngsters, and it’s amazing. Sometimes you hear absolutely phenomenally talented youngsters. For example, the first time I heard Krystian Zimerman, it was before he’d won the Chopin Prize. I was just knocked out. It was incredible. I had met him in Poland, and they were quite excited about him. But like any home-country boy, they were wondering if he was really as good as they thought he was. But in his case, he’s a wonderful artist, and that’s very gratifying. It’s really very nice to be a judge at a piano competition, because you hear a lot of people who play quite well. Then suddenly one person comes along who makes the entire jury sit up and take notice. At every competition I’ve ever judged, if somebody comes along who does something really special, it doesn’t matter what the musical persuasion of each individual juror is. Everybody leans forward and smiles at each other. That’s very positive.

BD:   Speaking about competitions, do you have any advice for judges?

Ohlsson:   No. [Both laugh] That was unhelpful, wasn’t it? [More laughter] I usually talk more than that, as you’ve noticed.

BD:   I don’t mind getting ‘no’ for an answer. Then let me ask, are competition’s the way to go for a young pianist?
ohlsson

Ohlsson:   I fear so, yes. Not that I’m anti-competitions... Obviously, I did very well with them myself, but my general fear about them is that when I won the Chopin Prize in 1970, I had won two other competitions which were important, but not as important. The Chopin Competition at that time got your name on the front pages of the world’s papers, and got you big articles and attention. We’ve now reached a point where competitions are almost a bit like suburban shopping malls. Everybody’s got one, and everybody’s got one that’s bigger than the last one. Each one is televised, and each one has a bigger prize, and each one gets you more engagements with more orchestras. When I won the Chopin Prize [recording shown at left], I had quite a few months before the next big competition winner came along, so I could really strike while the iron was hot. These days, when a competition happens, if that winner hasn’t made a sensation within a month, then there’s the next competition. I can’t keep track of them, so I don’t know which ones I would advise a young artist to win these days, because, at least in my time, 20 years ago, you knew which were the absolutely most important ones. There are just so many right now that we’ve gone overboard with them. [Remember, this conversation took place in mid-1988!]

BD:   Does this put too much pressure on the young artists that not only do they have to win the competition, but then they have to make it so quickly?

Ohlsson:   Yes, I think it does. It certainly put too much pressure on me, but some people manage and some people don’t. I have a great deal of sympathy because I don’t know what I would advise a young artist to do right now if he or she were absolutely brilliant. Competitions seem to be the only way. In the old days, you might be able to audition for a conductor. There still might be one or two conductors who would have the faith to put you on the subscription series of a major orchestra as an unknown. They would just risk it. Even though it’s not box office, they would introduce a young artist who is worthy to the public of a major city. They wouldn’t care if they’re not famous. Then, if it went well, and maybe if that conductor wanted to champion the young artist, they could help him out. But it is a very slow process.

BD:   Would you advise music directors of major orchestras to look for that one person each year, a pianist or violinist or cellist?

Ohlsson:   It would be an interesting idea to have a slot like that, but it would almost become like a competition, wouldn’t it? But like all the things we’re talking about, I don’t know the answer. That might be an interesting way to go, but I don’t know if it’s practical. It would be a tremendous commitment by the music director of a major orchestra, because then what happens if the one he picks turns out to not deliver at the moment of performance, which can easily happen. It’s one thing if a major artist with an established reputation doesn’t deliver on one night, because they’re known commodities, but if a youngster doesn’t deliver, bye. See you. It’s really tough.

BD:   The other side of the coin is if we don’t give all of these artists their chance, we won’t find who will emerge.

Ohlsson:   That’s theoretically one of the things competitions are about. They’re a weeding out process, or they’re a selection process. But not everybody functions best under the competitive circumstance.

BD:   Are there perhaps some people who don’t win the first prize at the competition who can or should have major careers?

Ohlsson:   Yes, of course, and it does happen. Somebody once suggested putting a list together of the non-first prize winners, starting with David Oistrakh, and Alicia de Larrocha, and Vladimir Ashkenazy, though he won second prize in Warsaw in 1955. There are some very distinguished people who won second prizes. I’ve won some, too, but mostly they go on to win a first prize somewhere, but not everybody. De Larrocha told me they just said to her, “Go home, little girl, and raise babies.”

BD:   Without mentioning names, are there some who win the first prize who doesn’t really belong at the top?

Ohlsson:   This is a common complaint, that competitions promote a consensus-style of playing. The person who’s most solidly competent and least controversial gets the first prize. I’ll say yes and no to your question, because sometimes it does happen. On the other hand, if you look at the pianists of my generation, such as Emanuel Ax and Murray Perahia and Krystian Zimerman, we don’t all sound alike. We’re not all just another version of the same thing. So I don’t really think it’s true that it only promotes a kind of neutrality. Certainly Murray Perahia is one of the least neutral pianists I know, and I love his playing. It’s certainly not neutral now, and it wasn’t back then. So it depends on the constituency of the jury, and on lots of things. Without being cynical, there is no lack of talent in the world. We have lots and lots and lots and lots of talent. It’s very precious, but unfortunately it seems that there are lots and lots of people who are very challenged, who never get their place in the sun. I probably almost sound arrogant saying that because I certainly have my place in the sun, but there are lots of people who don’t, for one reason or the other.
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BD: Like it or not, you’re there.

Ohlsson: Right. [Laughs] Oh, I like it. I like it just fine, but nevertheless it’s hard work to stay there because you have a responsibility to yourself, to the music, and to people who are supporting you. It’s very complex. Then there’s one other aspect of careers... There’s a funny saying we have vis-à-vis England, that the affection of the British public is hard to win and impossible to lose. People tend to like what they know, whether it be music, or performers, or foods, or whatever. So, once they have name-brand recognition of somebody, we’ve all heard such-and-such established artist who’s really just not doing well at all, and yet everybody gets up and screams and gives him a standing ovation and raves. What can you do?

* * * * *

BD:   Let us return to the topic of new music.

Ohlsson:   You mean of the music of our time?

BD:   Yes.

Ohlsson:   We certainly have an enormous number of composers out there. If we think the plight of the pianist is difficult, think of the plight of the composer.

BD:   What advice do you have for someone who wants to write for piano, either solo or ensemble or concerto?

Ohlsson:   Good luck. [Laughs] It’s very, very difficult. I won’t get into it too much because I’m certainly a champion of contemporary music. I’m a champion of music, period. I’m not a specialist. I view my relationship with contemporary music as being part of the same pie that my relationship with Mozart is part of. It’s all unity to me. I try to include some music of our time among my various activities. I know I’m hedging the question as to actual advice. Performers are a very important ally for composers. There is no question that getting to a performer who will perform your music at any level is very, very important, because music doesn’t exist until it’s heard.

BD:   Composers know that you will perform some new scores, so do they come to you all the time?

Ohlsson:   Right. The problem is that I’m now inundated, and I have not enough time to pay attention properly to these things. I do my best, but my best is far from good enough, and it’s frustrating. The other problem with new music, which composers understand only too well, is that if I want to learn a Beethoven sonata, I can pick and choose. I know how they all go, and I know the idiom, and I know different performances. If I want to pick a 20-minute sonata from among the works of 20 living composers, it’s going to be very hard, because since there’s no performance tradition, and often there’s no performance at all, often you have to learn a piece before you know whether you like it or not. Sometimes you’ve spent months, and nothing is more frustrating than spending months on a contemporary piece and then playing it a couple of times and knowing you don’t want to play it ever again.

BD:   Do you feel that you’ve lost that time, or have you grown a little bit?

Ohlsson:   I think both. It’s one of those unideal situations. Sometimes you’ve grown a great deal, but sometimes you haven’t, but it’s part of serving music well. It’s like paying your dues in any profession. It’s probably a good experience, and having done it, I might as well make a virtue of it. It’s an experience that musicians ought to have, but I can certainly see that playing new music is not the path of least resistance. So I don’t know what I would advise to composers.

BD:   Do you ever travel with your own piano?

Ohlsson:   No, most frequently I don’t. I do have an affiliation with Bösendorfer, with which I’ve been very happy now for over ten years. Basically, a piano has to be good, whatever the name on the fallboard. That’s a very interesting point too, because very often people are so prejudiced by the name, whatever it is, that even some professional pianists don’t listen to the piano itself, and have an opinion before they’ve even sit down at it. I won’t mention any names, but at a recent very large international competition, the piano technician, as a test, switched fallboards on two pianos that were similar enough looking, and most of the pianists fell right for it. They found the noble tone of the X brand on the wrong piano, and they found the other one quite neutral, even though it was the noble tone of an X. [Both laugh] People are just amazing. They’ll look at an X brand piano, and they’ll say they’re not even interested in trying it. I’m much more communicable than that, and I like pianos much too much. I don’t really care what the name is on the fallboard. Certain firms tend to make better pianos.

BD:   Did you want to stand up there and scream, “Suckers!”?

Ohlsson:   Sure. [Laughs] Absolutely, because whenever you play a piano that’s not a norm, such as a Steinway which is a norm, there is a concentration on the instrument. I feel that the firms making the best concert grounds these days are Steinway in New York and Hamburg, Bechstein to a certain extent, but they’re quite rare, and Bösendorfer in Vienna. Now we have a very interesting challenge from Yamaha, and they’re really developing and doing a very interesting job. André Watts’ affiliation with Yamaha is most astonishingly interesting. Now his head is on the chopping block because whenever he plays, they review the piano. When I first started working with Bösendorfer, people stopped reviewing me for a couple of years. They had to talk about the sound of the piano. It’s a bit like getting a new concert hall. Suddenly everybody’s an acoustical expert. You heard one concert of one kind of music from one seat, and suddenly you know everything about the hall. “This is a wonderful hall for this, and a lousy hall for that,” It’s the same when you hear one concerto played on a particular piano. I remember the first time I played a Bösendorfer in New York in a Mozart concerto, one of my friends came up and said, “It’s really very bright and brilliant,” and the next friend said, “It’s really very dark and mellow, and doesn’t project much.” Another said, “It has a very sustained singing tone,” and yet another other one said, “It sounds kind of tinny.” I wondered what their preconceptions were, and where they were you sitting in the hall. So it’s a very complicated no-win situation. But in any case, my relationship with Bösendorfer has been exceedingly pleasant, and I’ve gotten a lot of very good service. You need a good piano, and you need it to be well maintained.
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BD:   Does Bösendorfer provide a piano in each of the big cities where you play?

Ohlsson:   Yes, in almost any city that I play in North America, and in Europe to a great extent. They have a whole bank of pianos. It’s a small version of what Steinway has. Steinway must have over 300 pianos that they own and maintain for concert use, and that’s a difficult job. Bösendorfer has somewhere over three dozen in the logical spots. There are a couple in New York, one in Boston, one in Washington, and one or maybe two here in Chicago, just where you’d expect them. They often ship them out to the more provincial areas, too. I’ve gotten very good service, very good cooperation. They take care of their pianos very well, which is the most important thing. You get a basically good piano, and then you maintain it as well as possible, and that they’re doing. So for the most part, I’m very happy. Also, we have a very nice and very clear understanding that they’re not trying to enforce a relationship on me. In other words, I’m not honor-bound to play their piano. If I go into a hall, and even if they’ve sent in a piano, and I prefer X brand piano which is sitting in this hall, and the one you sent is really not as good, they’ll understand. But, of course, an artist must play the best piano available, which is a very enlightened and very realistic attitude. I’m not in the business of providing endorsements, although endorsements are very critical to piano firms because that helps sales, and I understand it. I like good pianos. I love Steinways, and I love Bösendorfers. I love good pianos, period. I even love some which have pretty weird names occasionally, and I’ve played on them with pleasure. Sometimes I’ve hated some Steinways and hated some Bösendorfers. That’s just the way life goes. It’s another one of life’s complexities, and you have fun with it. Then there’s another whole aspect about piano playing, which is how you can take three different concert pianists on the very same piano in the same hall, and it sounds like you’ve changed the instrument. You haven’t done a thing to it, they just sound different. Because the piano is such a suggestible instrument, you can actually believe you’re hearing a different instrument. A wife of a conductor, who’s a pianist and friend of mine is very perspicacious, and I asked her at one point, and she said, “I’ve heard you play on Mason & Hamlins, and Baldwins, and Bösendorfers, and Steinways, and Yamahas, and you always sound like you no matter what you’re playing on. But, of course, the piano does provide a color that is different.” I thought to myself, that’s what I’m hoping.

BD:   That’s a tribute to you.

Ohlsson:   I hope so. I was trying pianos once in London with Murray Perahia. Inadvertently, we both wound up at Festival Hall, and there were three Steinways. He brought one in, and I wanted to try the two which were there. So we each played the three pianos for each other. I don’t know what his opinion of me is in this sense, but certainly he and I are both a bit chameleon-like, in that we adjust to pianos. Some artists want pianos to be absolutely this way or that way, and don’t adjust. He and I both adjust as we go along. It was very, very hard for me to judge the pianos because after the first 20 seconds on each of the pianos, he sounded like him. He found his sound. I have a technician friend in Toronto who says the funny thing about Anton Kuerti is he makes everything sound like the Hamburg Steinway in his living room. It doesn’t matter what he’s playing on, because that’s the sound he’s looking for.

BD:   Maybe that’s what makes a piano good or bad, if you can adapt yourself to it, and it to you. There must come a point where there’s no hope...

Ohlsson:   Exactly. Can you find yourself in that piano, and can it give you what you need? In the most pragmatic sense, it’s a matter of does it play loud enough? Does it play soft enough? Does it repeat fast enough? Is it evenly voiced? The rest I do myself pretty much.

BD:   I assume that the tension can be adjusted by the technician. [See my interview with Franz Mohr, Chief Concert Technician with Steinway & Sons 1968-92.]

Ohlsson:   Yes, it can, and actually those things should be more uniform than they sometimes are. But I’ve become quite adaptable. Some pianists are quite unadaptable, and don’t wish to change. Each person has to do what’s right for them. I certainly don’t criticize even some of my greatest colleagues who have to have it voiced and regulated a certain way. That’s their issue. I’m not going to say it’s wrong.

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BD:   [Knowing that he was about to give an all-Chopin recital...] Do you have a special affinity for Chopin?

Ohlsson:   I hope so. I feel I have it, but I don’t know whether I have it or not. I wonder what Chopin would think sometimes. I hope he’d like it. I really feel a very strong and deep emotional connection to Chopin. I think I have the ability to bring out certain aspects of what’s important about him quite well. I do feel a very deep affinity. I have an emotional connection, and a sense of identification emotionally with his music perhaps more than any other composer, although there are a few others that I feel quite passionate about also. But with Chopin, there are certain pieces of his I’ve played more than I’ve played any other music. The subconscious is really very active, because with certain pieces like the Barcarolle and the Fourth Ballade, I’ve studied them so many times, and restudied them, and rethought them, and have been influenced by so many people, and rejected influences and acquired influences that it’s no longer a question of knowing the music. It’s in my nervous system. It’s in my genetic pattern. It’s as if I wrote the pieces.

BD:   Do you always find something new in them every time you look at them?

Ohlsson:   Oh, yes. Chopin happens to be an extraordinarily complex composer, and it’s virtually impossible to realize what he’s put into his scores, because they’re almost contradictory. Occasionally they’re real intellectual puzzles. I place him on the highest level.
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BD:   Is playing the piano fun?

Ohlsson:   For me it is. I don’t mean ‘fun’ in the casual sense, although even then sometimes it’s fun. It’s profoundly fun to be able to play. I hope that doesn’t sound arrogant. There are times when enough things are going right, meaning your head and your body and your soul and the piano and the temperature, when it’s almost blissful. It’s usually only seconds of bliss, or maybe milliseconds, but you have glimpses of Paradise, where there’s no barrier between you and what you want to do. I’m not saying that you’ve created bliss for anybody else. I’m just talking about the personal interior feeling. Yes, piano playing can be very pleasant. It can also be exceedingly tryingly difficult. It can be a real struggle. It’s all of those elements. It can be extremely sensuous. It can be extremely resistant. It can be intellectually stimulating and intellectually numbing sometimes for various reasons, such as if you’re caught in a situation with an unsympathetic collaborator, let’s say a conductor who you really don’t get along with. I’m not talking about incompetence, I’m talking about somebody whose musical soul you just don’t vibrate with. You just know it’ll be over, and you never mind soul, never mind bliss, never mind collaboration. You just keep this thing together, and be professional. Even that’s not so bad. It beats washing dishes.

BD:   Let me ask about your background. How old were you when you started playing piano?

Ohlsson:   I was eight when I started taking lessons. I grew up in White Plains, New York. I’m an only child, and my parents were not musicians, but they had had piano lessons and liked classical music. They thought that piano lessons were part of growing up, so when I was eight I got piano lessons. It wasn’t my idea. I had showed signs of being interested in music, but lots of kids show those signs. That doesn’t mean that there’s big talent there. They enrolled me at the local conservatory, and I was addicted after about two weeks. You couldn’t get me away from the piano. That’s just what I wanted to do.

BD:   Right away you knew that’s what you wanted to do?

Ohlsson:   My mother had to chase me outside to play. Then I would come back and want to play the piano. I was a serious kid.

BD:   Did this affect your studies in geography and history and social science?

Ohlsson:   No, I did real well in school. I’m an only child, and I did not choose nor was made out to be the spoiled only child. I was kind of an overachiever, I’m afraid, and quite bright and talented. I did very well in school... not a straight-A student because I was too busy with the piano, but I was always a straight-A minus student without horrendous difficulty. Sure, I worked hard. I’m not all facility, but I did real well with somewhat less effort than some of the grinds. The only thing I regretted by the time I was in high school was my thought that if I didn’t have to practice two or three hours a day, I’d really blow the roof off in math. I didn’t get a chance to, but that’s tough. I had no choice. I’d rather do music.

BD:   If something happened and you couldn’t be a pianist, maybe you’d go into conducting or composing?

Ohlsson:   That could be... My whole conducting career consists of having led two concerts with an orchestra. I wasn’t wonderful, but it was a very great education. I think all musicians should do that. The funny thing is that because I have some reputation, if I conduct they expect that they’re going to get something phenomenal. I understand why this happens, but it’s amazing how sometimes the two are not the same. Yes, if something would happen to my hands, it would be very depressing because I really love playing the piano. It’s also a physical love as well as everything else. But on the other hand, I feel I could function with music in many ways.

BD:   What about when you were just getting into music?

Ohlsson:   When I was young? No, I never thought about that so much. I was much more hooked on the piano than I am now in that sense. I’m hooked now, but when I was a teenager, I never thought about taking up conducting, or taking up teaching.

BD:   Have you done any teaching of piano?
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Ohlsson:   Not on a regular basis, just some individual lessons here and there. Sometimes people come and play for me in master classes. It’s very difficult teaching because it’s very easy to be a very inspirational teacher, but in the short run it’s very difficult to raise somebody musically. That’s a heroic task to do well, and I’m thankful for having had some very inspired teachers, because it’s not the same as playing. There are things which are similar, but it’s not the same process.

BD:   When you conducted, did that give you a new insight into what these guys do who are waving a stick?

Ohlsson:   Oh yes, absolutely. It’s like having the wool pulled from your eyes. I can’t even describe what it’s like, except that the funny thing about conducting that I noticed was that most of the time you’re not needed. When you’re needed, you’re so important it’s not even funny, and especially with a good orchestra, they can do it most of the time. But they need you for certain things, and then they can’t do that for themselves. That’s where you notice the difference between mastery and waving your arms. When you’re talking about the highest artistic level, there’s the ultimate miracle. Just as two different pianists can make the same piano sound different, if you ever get a chance to hear a fine orchestra with two conductors in a row, say they’re sharing a rehearsal or a performance, it’s amazing how from the first moment, not even saying a word, when they bring down the stick everything sounds quite different. There’s this subconsciousness, if you will, a spiritual reaction to people. That gets into the very intangible realm, which is real nevertheless.

BD:   Do you like being a wandering minstrel?

Ohlsson:   Yes and no. I like being where I am. I like being anywhere in the world, just about, but the traveling is incredibly boring and tiring and stressful. No question about that. I enjoy my wide acquaintance with many parts of our country that most people have never seen. I know the difference between Iowa and Idaho vividly, which many people don’t. Here in Illinois, people know the difference, but not on the coasts. I’m not a scholar about that, but I’ve really treasured my experiences. I know lots of little quarters in Europe that people don’t usually get to on their glamorous tourist tours. So yes, I like lots of things about the travel. You get to see, and get the flavor. Also, when I go places, I’m not a tourist, so I get to actually meet people and be involved literally backstage. I get to see what goes on behind the scenes a little bit, and you get to know social trends. I like that very much. However, I dislike the lack of continuity in my own life. It’s very difficult to be home and water your plants sometimes. Most people can say, “Sorry, I can’t do dinner on Tuesday, but let’s do it next Wednesday, or in a week.” I have a very tough time doing that because it’s very impractical, but you manage somehow.

BD:   Is home for you still New York?

Ohlsson:   New York, yes.

BD:   Thank you for coming back to Chicago, and for the conversation.

Ohlsson:   Thank you. Lovely to be here. This has been nice.

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This conversation was recorded in Evanston, Illinois on August 15, 1988. Portions were broadcast on WNIB three weeks later, and again in 1989, 1993, and 1998. This transcription was made in 2025, and posted on this website at that time.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here. To read my thoughts on editing these interviews for print, as well as a few other interesting observations, click here.

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Award - winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001. His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.

You are invited to visit his website for more information about his work, including selected transcripts of other interviews, plus a full list of his guests. He would also like to call your attention to the photos and information about his grandfather, who was a pioneer in the automotive field more than a century ago. You may also send him E-Mail with comments, questions and suggestions.